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', "-, -^ ':, "'\,. 1-800-565-0444 '. ..> http://W\vw go, n <..a/re ort / ,. "' . ' ..; ... ' " "*r ,. \ "Ì- :1 'I' . r---- - l Limited Edition Toys! Made in England '!8!< $199 "" )0. .,....ç). ... ) I Western Models: NY Checker Cab Handmade white metal (1:43) 5.15"long lIlliPUT 321 So Main, Yerington NV 89447 800-TIN-TOYS Stewart & Hunnisett FINE EUROPEAN TOURING Tuscany Enjoy the magnificent art, culture and natural beauty of this glorious region! We offer an exquisite week- long luxury tour. Very small groups. For a brochure please call or fax (212) 864-7840. 1. few exceptions, this is the world Roth has been writing about all his life. "Narrative is the form that his knowledge takes," Roth says of his father in "The Facts," "and his repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine." This is the life that Seymour Levov thinks he is not breaking with but extend- ing when he steps out of the ethnic en- clave and into what he imagines to be full- fledged Americanness. He thinks he can preserve the old values of work, family, and fair play but discard the atavistic com- pulsions of mindless discipline, author- ity, and tradition. What he is blindsided by is the culture of permissiveness. Sey- mour's genuine tolerance and sympathy are surrounded and subverted on all sides by the fake tolerance and sympathy of therapy, analysis, and liberationism- things as phony as the "Old" in "Old Rimrock." His patience, deference, and open-mindedness, his insistence on rea- soning things out and splitting the cul- tural differences, have produced in Merry Levova fanatic and a killer-"a pariah ex- iled in the very country where her family had triumphantly rooted itself in every possible way," as Zuckerman puts it. Sey- mour thought that liberalism was a form of authority, and he is made to see it as a mask for the loathing of authority. He thought that Americanness was an iden- tity, and he is made to see it as a mask for contempt for the identities of other peo- ple. But he can't go back, because the lime world he came from has been closed down, vandalized, destroyed. All the lime worlds of prewar America are closed down. He is in exodus from the diaspora. T HE idea that the author of "Portnoy's Complaint"-a real-life bombshell that exploded in February of 1969, a year after Merry Levov's fictional bombshell- has written a book about the corruption of American life by the culture of liberal permissiveness is likely to make some readers wonder whether "American Pas- toral" is a kind of recantation, a swerve to the cultural right. Weren't moral author- itarianism, the obsession with little-world ethnic identity, and the suffocation of family life the very oppressions Alexander Portnoy was fleeing Isn't a novel about a man who beats off using a piece of liver his mother will shortly prepare for the family dinner about as pennissive as it gets? "Portnoy's Complaint" was a misun- derstood book. When it appeared, it was attacked for lampooning its Jewish charac- ters, but it was also attacked, and by some formidably intelligent critics, as a simplis- tic manifesto of sexual liberation. Its author was accused by Diana Trilling of being a "child of an in discriminative mass culture" and its protagonist was described by Irv- ing Howe as "a man at ease with his mo- ment" -at ease, that is, with the insuffi- ciently tragic culture of swinging post- Freudian sexuality. But Portnoy is not at ease with anything. He is made just as crazy by the sexual freedom he has found as he was by the sexual repressiveness he fled. He escapes from the clutches of his mother only to drop into the clutches of the Mon- key. Roth didn't think that Portnoy rep- resented liberation. He thought that rep- resenting Portnoy represented liberation- liberation from what he regarded as the id- less stereotypes of Jewish characters in con- temporary fiction, and from middlebrow notions of stylistic decorum. Roth didn't think he was escaping from Newark. He thought he was escaping from Leon Uris. The heart of "Portnoy" is the same as the heart of "Sabbath's Theater" and "American Pastoral." It is the descriptions of the baseball games and the neighbor- hood life of W eequahic, the memories of what that world was like before the twin demons of enlightenment and lust made it unendurable. Portnoy's complaint is the same as Seymour Levov's. He is a prisoner of his own liberation. He stepped out, and now he is lost in America. Has Roth turned to the cultural right? If being on the cultural rIght means hav- ing an old-fashioned modernist commit- ment to high art, Roth has always been on the cultural right. If it means being a critic of the culture of liberalism, the question is the wrong question. A modernist com- mitment to high art means that you are, by definition, a critic of the culture of everything. "American Pastoral" is a very different kind of book from "Portnoy's Complaint," of course. "American Pastoral" is a traditional realist novel, and "Portnov" .I is a sixties performance piece. But they are both about the same irony and the same agony One makes a comedy of authority, the other makes a tragedy of the escape from authority. The difference is a little like the difference between "Pride and Prej- udice" and "Persuasion," or between "Pick- wick Papers" and "Our Mutual Friend." "American Pastoral" is darker, difficult, b " p "..e- more mature; ut ortnoy IS lorever. .